Earlier this week, the Mozilla Foundation published the Mozilla
Public License (MPL) version 2.0. This is a major update to their
flagship license, which covers most of the Foundation's own free
software projects, as well as others'.

Printers that can be reprogrammed by malicious print jobs are a
security risk. So are printers that only run code signed by the
manufacturer. For real security, printers should be running free
software controlled by its owners.

This week there's been a lot of fuss about Amazon releasing source code for software on its Kindle devices, including the Kindle Fire. A lot of the hype we've seen is simply unwarranted; while you can download the source code that Amazon was legally required to publish, most of the software on the device remains proprietary, and every Kindle is still Defective by Design.

Earlier this week the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and German
Federal Cartel Office (FCO) announced a joint decision regarding
Novell's proposal to sell 882 patents to CPTN Holdings, newly formed
by Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and EMC. The authorities ultimately
approved the sale, but with conditions that prevent the companies from
using the patents to attack free software.

Google recently made headlines after they identified some malware
being distributed through the Android Market. Not only did they stop
distributing those apps, but they used their "remote kill switch" to
remove the apps from phones where they were already downloaded. This
is a kind of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) that all computer
users should avoid.